Speaker 1: 0:31

Our goal isn't to get a numerical score Like our goal is to get product feedback at scale. It's to get who are your promoters that you can leverage, who are your detractors that you need no right. I would say it's more of that than a pure number. Some of the advice I got around it is, when someone actually responds with like a text response, immediately get back to them. That 24-hour quick SLA on those is super important and having it come from a person.

Speaker 2: 0:56

Once again, welcome to the Digital Customer Experience podcast with me, Alex Turkovich. So glad you could join us here today and every week as we explore how digital can help enhance the customer and employee experience. My goal is to share what my guests and I have learned over the years so that you can get the insights that you need to evolve your own digital programs. If you'd like more info, need to get in touch or sign up for the weekly companion newsletter that has additional articles and resources in it. Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom. For now, let's get started. Greetings and welcome. This is episode 68 of the Digital CX Podcast. I'm Alex Turkovich. It's so great to have you back this week and every week as we talk about all kinds of stuff digital related. I want to extend a warm welcome to this month's title sponsor, which is Vitally Awesome. Csp I've had the pleasure of diving into over the last couple of months and they're a real pleasure to work with. So more on them a little bit later.

Speaker 2: 1:54

The featured conversation today is one that I had several weeks ago with Mary Caballero of Champify. Champify is a really cool tool that allows you to track champions as they move to different jobs, which is an awesome thing and a huge problem that they're solving for, and we definitely talk about that in today's episode, as well as what she's doing to build out CS and digital at Champify. It's a rare glimpse inside a building program of an early stage company, which is so cool. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Mary Caballero, because I sure did. Yeah, you are here because you are in a cool and unique scenario that we haven't discussed much on the podcast, which is to say, you are very much heading up the customer facing effort of an early stage startup called Champify, which I'm crazy excited about. Hearing your journey and what you're doing to lead digital first and whatnot. Do you want to give everybody a little bit of a background and story of your life and how you got here?

Speaker 1: 3:04

Yeah, absolutely so I started I actually undergrad, studied math and computer science. I have this very technical background I didn't use in the early stages of my career as much and then I've kind of come back to think about how I can make my current job more data driven. Started out of school working in finance and investing and after a bit got into tech. I started at Plaid, the fintech company, in account management. That was my first foray into scaled account management. At the time they were hiring out a small team of scaled account managers for the first time. I was one of three account managers brought in and they were defining what it even meant at Plaid. So it's do you segment these accounts based on headcount, based on ARR? How?

Speaker 1: 3:48

many accounts can a scaled account manager manage at once. So that was like a really interesting experience. I was there for three years, but after a couple of years of that I moved into a strategic account management role and so that's a bit more of like your vanilla manage 20 customers thinking about upsells, deep customer relationships, working with key stakeholders so more proactive instead of that reactive process that it can be as a scaled organization. And then two years ago I joined Champify, which is this seed stage sales tech startup and we're basically working on powering the repeat customer channel. So you have all of these deep customer relationships that so many different teams have helped build.

Speaker 1: 4:27

Right, you think about sales that build those relationships pre-sale. You think about customer success that are building those post-sale relationships. And then you're like product engineering teams, right, not only do you have those like human to human based connections that you're building, but like great experiences in the product. So it's thinking about okay, when those people change jobs, how can you take all that value with them? And so we're surfacing up, right, if they're the right title and the right account, making sure that the salesperson knows about this and can engage them, so helping them on, like the who to reach out to the why and how and like a operationalized manner. So that's what we're doing at Champify. I was the first hire, so my job description can be kind of extensive, but the current mandate is all things post-sale you said it earlier kind of like everything that touches customers. So whether it's onboarding, renewals, customer education, like docs, customer marketing, like case studies, and then anything kind of like product feedback, product beta, so pretty much anything that touches our customers is what I'm now filming over there.

Speaker 2: 5:25

That's amazing. I don't know how you do that, but you know, tis the startup life, that's really cool. So you know, tis the startup life, that's really cool. So you know, the computer science thing is interesting because I would imagine, now that you're in this position, that has probably come in handy just from a contextual knowing what your coworkers are up to, kind of knowing the context of their roles and the challenges that they face.

Speaker 1: 5:58

Do you find that being in customer facing role but having that technical background has served you well? I think it has, and I would say more so my time at Plaid because it's a bit more of a dev tool where, like, yeah, I'd work with product managers but the people that are using Plaid and building with Plaid were engineers I think it did give me a lot of empathy for their situation and also a good understanding Like the technical docs, like made sense. Now we're a bit more with like ops teams and thinking about revenue tool stacks, less about like touching a customer's code base, but definitely I was like very happy to understand a lot of that context in those more technical conversations.

Speaker 2: 6:25

Yeah, for sure, we talked earlier before we started recording, about you're in New York City city proper, which is awesome. Is that that? Where are you from originally?

Speaker 1: 6:35

I'm from the dc area I went to california for school, and now I'm back on the east coast oh, you went coast hopping.

Speaker 2: 6:42

That's cool, but you're east coast like that's your home right it's where so much of my family, my friends, are, so I definitely call it home yeah, that's cool, okay, well, um look, we are talking digital and one of the questions that I ask all of my guests is essentially you know what, what their definition of digital CS is, if they were to meet somebody on the street and try to explain it to them, so what would you, you know, especially in your world? I'm interested in your answer of what you would say.

Speaker 1: 7:10

Yeah, I think this does relate to being a slim team, but I was talking to Christy Hollingshead from a couple weeks ago and I really liked her definition, which was doing more with less, and I do think that kind of goes into my main ability to unlock capacity. When I'm in a situation at the startup is like what can I do digitally?

Speaker 1: 7:29

So I really liked her definition and it's kind of like the cross section or the combination of customer marketing, customer education, customer success and ops, but really just like kind of using the digital tools we have at our disposal to uplevel the customer experience.

Speaker 2: 7:44

Yeah, I love that your scope is super broad, right, and the things that you do, like you mentioned four or five different things that in a lot of other organizations would be like a leader's full time job with like four or five people under them. You know like getting it done. And so I'm curious also because you know a lot of what I think about when I think about digital is, yes, more with less customer experience, using tools to help serve the customer, and things like that. But I would imagine that you are also probably utilizing a lot of things internally to help you out from a productivity standpoint or, like you know, really managing all those work streams Like what is your day in the life of? Kind of look like.

Speaker 1: 10:39

Yeah, one of the tools that I love, that I would give a shout out to, is Dina Dinaai Um, and they help so kind of if you look back, like how customer success has changed so much of its meetings and emails and we've moved into this world where Slack is way more common and I personally have Slack channels with all of my customers and so it's thinking about, if you're moving to a Slack based world, how can you kind of consolidate or centralize your customer communications. So they've built out something to centralize messages, help categorize the different requests you're getting, have like a support portal, a sign out task. So I think their tool is a really great way to boost productivity. When you're thinking about how can I scale customer comms, and one feature that I love definitely top of the list for reasons why we pay for them is their ability to highlight customer departures kind of classic customer success thing, keystick. Older departure is one of the top reasons in turn.

Speaker 1: 11:35

I feel like any leader would tell you that, and it can be really hard to figure out who actually leaves an account. I mean, our whole company is figuring out job changes, but arrivals are easier to do in the sense that I start a new job. I update my LinkedIn publicly available data. I leave my job. It's pretty rare that like same day or within a week I would update my LinkedIn profile. So like the timeliness of that can be really difficult and because Thina's plugged into Slack and you have all of your key stakeholders in your Slack channels, if someone gets deactivated they just tell you right away. That has been a really cool like device to identify that key stakeholder departure at scale.

Speaker 1: 12:16

I think where I could be doing better or kind of what I've been thinking about is like I don't have any automation built off it. It's great visibility and I have some manual tasks, but it's like how do I get an alert and then scale that up to like figuring out how can I? You know I get 10 of them in a day. What do I do? Versus?

Speaker 2: 12:32

I just want to yeah, like, what are the playbooks? Playbooks that are built off of that? You know that's so, that's so cool. I mean, I think most cs folks would agree with the fact that, hey, when your champion leaves an organization, that is like alarm bells number one alarm bell ringing, like you know. So that and and I think a lot of orgs actually struggle with knowing this information, especially once they've gotten to a point where there's lots of customers and lots of people managing those customers, it can get really hard to track. So in a way, you've got a little bit of a luxury there over some other orgs, which is cool.

Speaker 1: 13:11

Yeah, it's very cool. No-transcript.

Speaker 2: 13:42

You know who it is. Yeah, yeah, again, that's something a lot of works struggle with. So I would imagine that a lot of the things that you're focused on, because you're one person, is driving digital first stuff, like you kind of have no option to be digital first. Can you talk through some of the things that you are doing to cover your customer base?

Speaker 1: 14:05

So I kind of mentioned this but like, yeah, it's the best way to unlock capacity. So it's figuring out, like, what are the things that take up the most amount of manual time? What are the things that are pain points for amount of manual time? What are the things that are pain points for customers and like, what outcomes you want to drive? But for us it was. I spent tons of hours on calls with customers talking through x, y and z thing and so one. It was like, yes, written doc to the classic. But embedding loom videos into the docs has been really beneficial because you write something down but you can explain it 30 seconds. It takes so much less time. And I think I've found that you send a customer something written and they're like, hey, let's talk about it. But when I send someone a loom talking through it, I rarely get like, hey, let's schedule a meeting.

Speaker 1: 14:46

So, reliance on loom whether it's embedded in the doc or just something I use for async communications has been super helpful. And then, of course, you can just recycle all the looms because you get a lot of the same questions. So that piece has been big. On the user education front, this is where, when I think about, like, what'll drive the best outcomes or have the biggest impact, the way that Champify works is you surface up a ICP prospect at a target account, but what we want is we want someone to have a close one deal from that prospect. But to get to that you need to have a sales rep engaging that person.

Speaker 1: 15:26

And so we have this very heavy reliance on AEs and SDRs, engaging their contacts, and so user education is something that I think a lot about, because day to day, I'm engaging with sales managers and sales leadership, and it's rare that I find myself in a room unless it's really pre-planned talking to the people that are actually using the tool.

Speaker 1: 15:45

So it's thinking about how do you drive a continual education. The original way it worked and I kind of get into what we're in the middle of launching is when we launched with Champify at a customer account. We would do a live training enablement session, let everyone know what the tool is, how it works, value, prop, et cetera, and I just think there are so many reasons why this one point in time training just doesn't actually accomplish that. Like scaled approach. You have new people onboarding at a customer account. You have people that are out of office, people that missed the meeting last minute. People honestly weren't paying attention.

Speaker 2: 16:17

They have other things going on and you know they're not watching the recorded session.

Speaker 1: 16:20

I was kind of exploring how do you give that continual education in a way that's bite-sized, that people would actually want to read and that actually is impactful. I'm betaing it right now with a couple of customers. The plan's end of month to go live. But we have this welcome campaign where we're just taking the Champify best practices and spreading it out over a seven day nurture, hitting people's inboxes. Right now it's email based. I think we can think about like how to change it over time, but including like hey, our AE uses this for a LinkedIn based outreach. Here's like our best practice message hey, you're going to get this kind of email versus Slack alert. So again, spreading it out in a manner where we're not like slapping them over the head with, like here is a long, long email you have to read. Yeah, and thinking of other things you can pull on, like sending it from our founder instead of from me or from marketing. Totally yeah, that's the big scaled education play we're in the middle of launching.

Speaker 2: 17:20

Are you? I would imagine you're somewhat of an avatar for Champify customers. You know what I mean. Like oh, it's Mary at Champify. If they have a problem, I'll just reach out to Mary. Is that kind of the case? Or are you isolated in that way behind systems or like what's the vibe if I'm a Champify customer?

Speaker 1: 17:32

Yeah, I think that we made an early bet on customer success in the sense that, like I, was their first hire. I think it's rare that you would have someone with a customer success background be the first hire at a company, and so we highly value our customer relationships. For, you know, getting into new accounts, we're talking about referrals and references right Later stage product feedback, like there's so many reasons valuable. So right now, like yeah, things are sent on my behalf that maybe aren't from me, but usually things come back to me. Like if someone ever responds to like marketing comms, it'll come back to me. I'm in like all of our channels with our customers. So this is where you talk about, like what does digital cs mean a year from now for us? I think it'll change, but for now it's the relationship base, like the human to human contact has been so huge for us and so we try to maintain that.

Speaker 2: 18:19

Yeah, yeah, I foresee like, let's say, two, three years from now. You guys are like series B, rocking it, got like a bunch of customers. You've got a bunch of folks in the CS org, but marry it champify is still a thing Like that's where all the emails come from and that's who the ghostwriter in the community is, and like all that kind of stuff. Like there's huge merit to that kind of stuff because what you mentioned, like that personalization and that relationship that you've built with customers and you know people are smart, they know it's not you Like. You know I get like Riverside, the platform that we're chatting on, I get emails from them all the time. It's I think it's Abe at Riverside or whatever. Who knows if Abe is a real person, but I've gotten used to seeing Abe's name in that stuff and it's like okay, you know, it feels more personal than like info at or you know super real, and I lean heavily on that too when I think about heinous education campaigns going to come from Todd at Champify, not marketing at Champify.

Speaker 2: 19:22

And.

Speaker 1: 19:22

I do think that, yeah, over time, like, whether it's Todd at or Marriott, it is a good way to drive those kinds of like adding in the personalization where you can, but it's. I get that kind of like oh, is this clearly automated? But then to your point, you get them all the time, I get them all the time and I'm like no, this is what everyone does. You have to really put yourself back and like you can't be one-to-one all the time.

Speaker 2: 19:42

You can't be, and you know it's you. You were talking about automation earlier, like in hey, I want to have a brief chat with you about this show. Did you know that roughly 60 percent of listeners aren't actually subscribed to the show, on whatever platform they're listening to it? Algorithms, love, likes, follows, subscribes, comments, all of that kind of stuff. So if you get value out of the content, you listen regularly and you want to help others to discover the content as well, please go ahead and follow the show, leave a comment, leave a review. Anything that you want to do there really helps us to grow organically as a show. And while you're at it, go sign up for the companion newsletter that goes out every week at digitalcustomersuccesscom.

Speaker 2: 20:28

Now back to the show. So where I operate most of my time, we have these things that look like they come from the CSM or they look like they come from whatever. They're totally automated, like regular reach out emails. But then if somebody engages with that, that's where the human comes in and and I think that's that's the power of that kind of stuff is because it kind of feels like a human started it, even though a human didn't start the engagement, you know. But that's, I think that's you know, scaling one-on-one, I suppose I don't know.

Speaker 1: 21:00

Yeah, no, it's real, because another thing we're talking about now is nps, which I think like our goal isn't to get a numerical score, like our goal is to get product feedback at scale. It's to get who are your promoters that you can leverage for introductions and marketing content and who are your detractors that you need no right like that's. I would say it's more of that than a pure number. But some of the advice I got around it, which goes back to your point, is, when someone actually responds with like a text response, immediately get back to them. Like that 24-hour quick SLA on those is super important and having it come from a person offering 15 minutes on the calendar, you know like there are ways you can scale it. You round robin it with people you figured out out. But that was a big piece of advice I got around like yeah, it feels automated nps feels like goes to a black hole when you bring it back and it's like clear that we're reading everything and listening to you, like that's where you really drive.

Speaker 2: 21:50

You are speaking my language right now because, like I can't, I you know the number of. We're all very used to responding to these things and we all know nps like everybody, and their mom has gotten an NPS question. Like we know that. But I'm used to companies not responding Like I'm used to putting it out. You know, providing feedback, especially if I, like you, know the platform or the product or whatever it is Providing feedback and I'm just like, okay, well, that's done, I'm not going to hear back from them.

Speaker 2: 22:20

When you do respond to those things and I agree with you, the number doesn't mean shit Like I don't care about the number, right, I really don't care about the number. What I care about is like, what did you provide with that number and what can I tie it to that can help me make improvements to the business? You know, tag you for can you, you know, do a testimonial or a blog post or something like that? Like that stuff is huge. But it all starts with that like engagement of look I'm. You responded to me, so I'm going to respond to you. And guess what? Because you responded, it means the next time you do an NPS survey to you know, again, it's they're they're more likely to respond so.

Speaker 1: 23:01

No, it's super real. I think that's probably the case with a lot of detractors Like this is a hypothesis that I will be testing shortly but it's how many of those detractors, when you respond to them, when you show that you're listening and you maybe even take that feedback into account, whether it's product roadmap or otherwise how many of those go up right? I'm really thinking about, even just with that human engagement, maybe you don't even add it to your product roadmap. How does that move the needle and how does that build a champions from someone that maybe didn't have the best?

Speaker 2: 23:25

experience For sure, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 23:27

A lot of times folks just want to be heard and listened to and actively heard. I mean, where it gets super hard and where I struggle with my team is, like you know, we've taken it on to say look, we're covering 5000 customers, we've put out these N NPS surveys and we're responding to every single piece of feedback, which gets tedious. But then what's even more tedious is like okay, you've actually set up a follow-up conversation with this customer, which means now you're on the hook to show you're making improvements. So it becomes this whole thing. That is like it's a slippery slope which you know some teams can do, some teams can't do that. But I think the fact that you know you're listening and responding, that's just half the battle.

Speaker 1: 24:09

Yeah, and it'll be our first time doing it. So I am interested to see like is all of the feedback amazing nuggets? Is it like half? Is you know trying to figure out what meshes with our hypotheses? You know what's validating, what meshes with our hypotheses? What's validating? But I do think like baseline is like you are bettering their experience because you are actually coming back with a human connection and showing them that you're listening. So, yeah, agreed, I think like that for me feels like table stakes for this and then hopefully we build off of and learn a bunch. But that's like the table stakes for me yeah, that's awesome, I love it.

Speaker 2: 25:05

So you know, as I alluded to on the show, that's awesome, I love it. A few lessons learned over the past few years in your journey at Champify Because you're at 11 employees right now, right, which is still scrappy and startup-y and whatnot. For others that are kind of in a similar situation and in smaller organizations. What could you highlight as lessons learned or things to do or things not to do to folks who are in a similar situation? Things to do or things not to do?

Speaker 1: 25:24

to folks who are in a similar situation. Yeah, I think that a couple of things I've learned. So one is just having the right mentors. Like personally, I'm earlier in my CS journey. I mean, I've been a CSM for a long time.

Speaker 2: 25:37

It doesn't sound like. It doesn't sound like you're.

Speaker 1: 25:42

Well, thank you, but kind of surrounding yourself by the people who can help validate your theories and tell you hey, I made this mistake three years ago. This is what I recommend. So one is just like making sure you have mentors to support you. For me it's lane hart. You actually had him on the show a couple weeks ago.

Speaker 1: 25:59

He's amazing and what's cool too, is he doesn't have all the answers, but he knows enough people where he can point me in the right direction too, so it's not like you need one person to tell you everything, but again, it's like creating that network effect of like then I talk to someone and then you know you learn. So having surrounding yourself with those mentors is really important. And then the other thing that's kind of just like a learning is, I think, a lot about like what key behaviors I want to drive. And the second part of that is like how do you actually measure it? Like earlier this year I was working on this campaign where I was like I clearly want to drive manager level buy-in to do X, y and Z behaviors, but then I didn't follow through with like okay, but how do I measure that? And so for me it was like I never validated, like did this thing, this project I spent time on, did it drive the behavior I was hoping it to?

Speaker 1: 26:45

As I think about this like welcome campaign, that's like in flight. And then NPS, which is hopefully coming like in the next six weeks or four weeks, it's like okay, but what? Like how am I measuring this? Because that's where I've like missed in the past and I think like the great upside to working at a company this size, like you can move extremely quickly and you can validate your theories so quickly. And so it's like, if you can't do that, if you can't actually validate theory with the numbers, then it's like, okay, like you know, you're not actually gaining anything by working at a small organization that can move quickly.

Speaker 2: 27:15

So that's something that's definitely top of mind for me yeah, that's huge when you can pivot like that and not be afraid to like throw stuff out if it doesn't work. You know, and I love where your mentality is in terms of like hey, I've got. I know I want to impact this metric. How am I going to measure it? Let's put some stuff in place. You know, does it make a difference? There's a big part of just like throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing if it sticks. It's like a part of the whole thing. So you know, you talked about this kind of onboarding flow that you're testing and whatnot. What are some other things that are kind of on your radar that you want to go do to improve?

Speaker 1: 27:57

like you know, customer experience, customer journey, all that stuff. So I talk about this NPS thing, which I'm going to get out the door and that'll be a process, but after that it's how do I scale onboarding? Because right now it's like the media process that I'm engaged in and I think there's pros and cons to it. Right, it's a great time to get to know your stakeholders and have them trust you and show them that you understand sales and sales strategy. And there are all these amazing best practices that, when you signed a contract and committed to working with us, we are now cashing in on that partnership knowledge to share.

Speaker 1: 28:25

So it's a mixed bag where, like, it takes a lot of time but it's a great time to spend with customers. So it's like I want to really think about what friction points are there? What aspects is it really on product and engineering to work on? And then, what aspects is it like from? Like, whether it's customer marketing or ops or just customer success? Like, where can I start to move the needle and scale onboarding? So I don't have any answers yet but that is like very much on my mind.

Speaker 2: 28:51

You know you can't one-on-one it as much as you'd like to and you know, hopefully we all work in environments where the product kind of onboards itself. I know I don't Like it's highly complex and hard and all that kind of stuff. That's where being tied into the product organization is huge and probably where your background kind of helps you with that as well, because those in-product things that can be built out is just a massive time saver.

Speaker 1: 29:18

And it's a good problem to have. It's like, well, if we're closing more deals and I have 10 onboardings this month, like I want to have that problem right, like we want to be bringing in customers, but if I had 10 onboardings this month, life would be tough. So, yeah, it's really trying to strike the balance of never having that be a problem with launching customers, because we see time to value as like a really important metric we look at. But yeah, whether it's in the product or more education, a customer portal, I like when I listen to a couple of these episodes the concept of a customer portal comes up a lot, which Ladd did pretty well.

Speaker 1: 29:50

Actually, they had like support and billing and design and like all these things wrapped into one experience. And so it's like, what if we did that? Like what would that unlock for?

Speaker 2: 29:58

us.

Speaker 1: 29:59

So I kind of need to figure out like map the journey out better. But yeah, onboarding is very much a smooth thing.

Speaker 2: 30:04

Yeah, that's massive. That's cool. Well, I would imagine you don't have a lot of spare time on your hands. I'm always curious what's in people's content, diet, and what you're paying attention to, what you're reading and podcasts to listen to or whatever to help keep yourself kind of fresh and into new ideas.

Speaker 1: 30:23

Yeah, this podcast I love, so that's a good one. I really like Emily Kramer's MKT One newsletter. Her like marketing one newsletter. I have five, six years of customer success experience, but I don't have a lot of marketing experience and shout out to our marketer, Taylor Adele, she's amazing. I've learned a lot from her, but those kind of she Emily Kramer's really like frameworks for how you think about that, and so I've found her work to really play nicely into how I think about what campaigns under the digital CS umbrella I want to think about.

Speaker 1: 30:52

So those are two ones, and then a book recommendation, which a little bit less on digital CS, but I think it goes more into building a company, building yourself and your career, and then also a really good understanding of like a work-life balance is. If you know Tony Fidel, he's the creator of like the iPad and the iPhone. His book build is fantastic and I would recommend it to anyone. So, our CTOs and it's me like, I think, in my first month in the job and yeah it's, it's such a good one.

Speaker 2: 31:21

That's cool. Nobody's ever recommended that, so I'll definitely dig into that build. Yeah, the marketing thing is interesting, right, and maybe we could spend a couple of minutes on on just that relationship, because I think there are several key relationships that are super important when it comes to digital and just customer success in general, and one of those key relationships is marketing, because your audience is roughly the same. You're doing some outbound campaigns. You want to make it seem like you're one entity instead of like oh, this email's from marketing, I, this is from wherever. So what kind of things are you guys paying attention to when it comes to that, or are you so small that it doesn't? Really there's not a lot of effort that needs to go into it.

Speaker 1: 32:06

I think it's a mixed bag where I find that when you're communicating with a customer is different than communicating with a prospect is on the sales side, you really have to lead with value and the value prop and usually with customers they get it like yeah, you bring a new stakeholder. You kind of maybe need to start a couple steps back, but usually it can be a bit more like educational around. Here are the next steps to post, like let me educate you on why we're here to begin with, and that has been something that when I think about how do I write these more marketing based engagements, I have to leave value more, because I think that's just been a little bit of a shift, especially when you talk about the user based campaigns, like I'm usually talking to leadership, I'm not usually talking to those sales reps themselves, and so they are kind of a new audience and so you do need to think about can we think about value first and then going through hey, here are the tactical things that we're going to talk about and how we're going to drive success in your role. So that's been a little bit of a mindset shift, and I also think the tooling is really different too.

Speaker 1: 33:00

I did scaled CS at Plaid, like I mentioned, but I also spent a lot of time in your classic customer success role, where it is so much more one-to-one, and so it's just again shifting that mindset to with marketing. What are you doing in Slack? What are you doing in slack? What are you doing in email? What does it mean to run a webinar? Who do you engage with? How do you drive success with customers and make them happy by having them on a webinar, right like? I think there's a whole new version of customer success that you can drive through more of those like traditional marketing channels.

Speaker 2: 33:30

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's super smart. I guess one thing we didn't really talk about as well was the whole reason why Champify exists, because that's a huge problem, this thing of people change jobs. Because you think about the average deal cycle, right.

Speaker 2: 33:50

You have several sales conversations. It's a two-month, it's a six-month, it's a year-long cycle. You're talking to these people, then you move to post-sale and stuff starts happening. People change jobs, champions go elsewhere, move from company to company and it can be this massive effort to keep track of who your key contacts are. It is a massive effort, right track of who your key contacts are. It is a massive effort, right, and so I. And it's funny because hearing you talk about the kinds of things you're focused on as well as like directly related to the problem that Champion you know Champify is there to solve, is like dude, who do I engage? That's like problem number one for so many orgs.

Speaker 1: 34:33

Yeah, no, it's very real, and we find that people come to us for two main reasons. It's either they see this organically happening, where customers come back to them as they change jobs, and they're only aware of them because it's reactive, because someone came inbound, but they're like whoa, this makes up a really good percentage of meetings that we're creating or revenue that we're closing. These deals are closing much more quickly, right? People notice it happening and they're like how do I operationalize this? So that's one way people come to us. And the other is like, especially in this macro environment, we're really struggling to hit targets Like what's a new channel that we can leverage for engagement?

Speaker 1: 35:07

So, whether it's you are pushing out more events and you're going to have more of those event and attendees, you're going to target. Maybe you're going to have more of those event attendees you're going to target. Maybe you're doing something like Sixth Sense and you're getting some intense signals, or something like Champify, where we're like hey, let's identify all those former customers that you didn't know about and try to target them. So those are kind of the two ways people usually get involved with us, and it's also from, like a higher level. What accounts do you even target. And so if you start to see like hey, you have 15 former customers over at Clary or over at Ladd.

Speaker 1: 35:37

You should go talk to them right. Where do you even get started? How do you score a good fit account? So that's also a cool way.

Speaker 2: 35:42

Well, there's so much effort being put into this concept of a CSQL. Right now I think everybody is kind of talking about CSQL and some have implemented something like that and some haven't. But know, when you think about that, your, your cs, qualified leads aren't necessarily just like expansion leads, like product expansion leads and service expansion and all that kind of stuff. It's like, hey, john smith was our champion, moved over to this other company. We know about it because we use, you know, champify um, so let's like go after him, you know. So it's. It's like a crazy warm csql and it's like money left on the table that not a lot of folks are going after.

Speaker 1: 36:27

So that's super cool yeah, and we have another customer. Not many people have very strong inbound motions today, so I think they're kind of on an island, but they have crushing on inbound and the way they think about it is okay. Which one of the people coming inbounds are former customers. So instead of it's like the proactive, go talk to them. It's like hey, we have so many leads, how do we prioritize the pre-existing?

Speaker 2: 36:48

yeah, and then go go into them with that context like, hey, I know you guys used us in, so you know, do you want to have a conversation about how it would work there? Yeah, do you want to give any shout-outs? I mean, you mentioned Lane and I forget your marketing person. You mentioned her as well. Any of the shout-outs you want to give?

Speaker 1: 37:06

Yeah, taylor, adele, she's amazing. Shout-out to my boss, todd he. He is just a great sounding board for me and we really talk through like what projects we want to embark on, what behaviors do we want to drive. He's my main internal sounding board and I think it's really important to have your external people, but at some point you have to bring it back with your internal, your business context and figure out like OK, within the confines of Champify, like which one of these theories make the most sense. So he's a great sounding, fantastic people manager and I feel like she's really helped me realize like how do you manage up, how do you figure out like the career development amid the crazy things that happen day to day and stuff. So she was just a great like life mentor, more than CS, but general life mentor for me.

Speaker 2: 37:48

I love it. That's so cool, and props to Todd for introducing us. I think he's a huge champion of yours because he could have easily gone. Let's talk, or whatever he's like. No, you need to talk to Mary.

Speaker 1: 37:59

He's good at that. It's one of the things that make him a great manager.

Speaker 2: 38:01

Yeah, that's so cool, well, awesome. I've super enjoyed this conversation, even though it had some odd starts and my computer crashing and all that kind of fun stuff, but it was very enlightening. And, you know, I hope it has unlocked some things for folks that are in a similar situation to you out there. How can people engage with you, find you, chat with you and all that stuff?

Speaker 1: 38:23

Yeah, linkedin is best. I love talking to people, whether it's in the same role or like an adjacent role. I think there's so much to learn and the concept of digital CS is changing so drastically, and I feel like the best way to learn is from others. So, yeah, reach out to me on LinkedIn. Happy to chat anytime. Linkedin's best way.

Speaker 2: 38:40

Well, enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks for joining. Hopefully we'll talk soon.

Speaker 1: 38:43

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Speaker 2: 38:47

Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment down below. It really helps us to grow and provide value to a broader audience. You can view the Digital Customer Success Definition Wordmap and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom. This episode was edited by Lifetime Value Media, a media production company founded by our good mutual friend, dylan Young. Lifetime Value aims to serve the content, video, audio production needs of the CS and post-sale community. They're offering services at a steep discount for a limited time. So navigate to lifetimevaluemediacom, go have a chat with Dylan and make sure you mention the Digital CX podcast sent you. I'm Alex Trukovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.